Healthcare facilities face a variety of challenges due to increasing patient demands for healthcare services. The increasing demands require healthcare facilities to provide high quality healthcare services in the most efficient way possible. To deliver the most efficient healthcare services, decisions affecting the efficiency of a healthcare environment are often required. For example, a healthcare provider may be faced with a decision to either add an extra nurse to a shift or to make another bed available in an effort to increase efficiency. The decision is difficult to make without objective evidence to assist in the decision-making process.
Simulations are available to analyze hypothetical scenarios to improve efficiency, identify areas to improve upon, and to suggest alternative procedures that may help in future decision-making situations, among other things. The simulations are typically, however, either after-the-fact analyses or hypothetical analyses and the output results are unmanageable data spreadsheets that require organization into some format that is useable by a clinician. Existing simulations are not real-time simulations based on real-time actual data relevant to a current situation. Thus, clinicians are not able to easily make a decision based on objective output data that is in a readily useable format.